In Utah’s caucuses, the political parties’ more extreme bases rule the nominating process – more, it seems, than in just about any other state. Before anyone gets too excited about Bennett’s ouster being an expression of national conservative outrage, let’s note that Representative Jim Matheson now faces a primary. Matheson is the lone Democrat in Utah’s delegation. His sin? Voting against Obamacare. In Utah’s caucus system, being insufficiently liberal can get you in as much trouble as not being conservative enough. I found this comment interesting:

Much in the same fashion as what Utah Conservatives accomplished against Senator Bennett, an ideological sense of pureness has overcome Utah Liberals, who want to remove their one chance of representation in Washington, because he isn’t big government enough…. if the Republican Caucus wants to emerge a stronger and healthier coalition come November, I would suggest a gameplan for maintaining a sense of Ronald Reagan’s big tent and his 80 percent friend, not a 20 percent foe approach. If we lose the Ronald Reagan Republican formation, than our movement will shrivel and die, especially if we don’t reinstate the Eleventh Commandment of Republican politics.

Writers in the blogosphere (including yours truly) often criticize our national political class. Well, Bennett is one of the good guys: decent, thoughtful, conservative, classy, and well-spoken. The hard-core anti-Bennett forces in Utah who, amid their gloating, are calling the Senator a RINO have a very heavy burden to carry in winning that argument. Others, like Dan Riehl, wonder whether the tea partiers are controlling the situation quite as much as they think they are.

The tea party movement is a great and important phenomenon, but excesses are excesses, no matter who commits them, and the Bennett episode was one. Excuse me if I don’t join in the celebration.

Obama let on that this frenzy to achieve passage of a hugely irresponsible and politically unpopular bill was in large part ego-driven when he started hounding House Democrats to save his presidency. (He, however, has no interest in saving their congressional careers as he demands that they walk the plank to vote against their constituents’ wishes.)

This was the candidate who created a cult of personality, who told us he represented the “New Politics,” who was going to eschew politics-as-usual, and who would be post-partisan, post-racial, and post-ideological. Now he’s a handful of votes away from a humiliating defeat. No wonder it’s desperation time. His possible failure would not be a mere political failure; it would be the obliteration of his own mythology.

Should he squeak it out, Obama’s “victory” would come with a heavy price. Gone is the image of a policy sophisticate (try watching that Bret Baier interview a few times without wincing). Gone is the “moderate” moniker. And gone is the notion that he’d usher in a new era of less contentious and less corrupt politics. (It’s a new era, perhaps, but hardly a better one.) There is no mistaking now the depth of the campaign deception. The public has figured out what he is all about. And increasingly, they dislike what they see.

I think the Senate bill is going to pass the House this weekend and that any bill to enact “fixes” will be quickly mired down.  So the Senate bill will become the law of the land.

Five or ten years from now we will not recognize the health care system we have, and we won’t like what we see there either. For the rest of our lives, unless this thing is repealed (and don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen) the debate will be like Social Security has been: How much money do we put into this program? That will take place alongside lie after lie about the program’s sustainability.

In fact, what we may have here is a government entitlement that is both unrepealable and unsustainable. The “unrepealable” part is what the Left wants. I’m not sure they care about the “unsustainable” part, because I think their solution to that is for the United States to become like Sweden.   I don’t think that’s what the country voted for in 2008.

And yes, insurance companies are a big problem. But buying health insurance will also be a lot different in the future. By federal law, we will all have to buy health insurance, which is not such a big problem to me, but we will have to buy a one-size-fits all policy that meets government standards. Say good-bye to your choices in the matter. And if you think the cost of your health insurance is going down, you will probably be surprised.

This is a big deal, folks. And it’s being passed despite opposition from a pretty large majority of the American people.

Then things are going to get very interesting.

You can see Justice Samuel Alito shaking his head and mouthing the words, “Not true,” in response to the president.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, we have this from Georgetown law professor Professor Randy Barnett:

In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds [of] Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

Instapundit has a collection of additional comments on this latest episode.

One of the criticisms we hear about President Obama is that he is arrogant. This episode certainly seems to support that claim. And that attitude of arrogance may pervade his administration. In the video, you can see Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, at the Court members’ right. He is sitting right next to them. At least, he was, until he leapt to his feet and, with a grin, began applauding the president’s statement. If nothing else, this whole episode is appallingly impolite.

And to think the president is a lawyer.

“We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.”

–Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times column today, “As the Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Can’t Seem to Find His.”  Ed Morrissey wonders whether Obama “has lost Maureen Dowd.”  Read the whole thing. (HT:  Instapundit.)

After a reference to the story of the emporer’s new clothes, Steele states his thesis:

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Steele’s piece is so tightly written that it is really impossible to excerpt fairly.  But here is one of his central and typically well-developed points:  Barack Obama is essentially a content-free president: 

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called “individuating”—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots”—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

One has to raise such points with great care in order to avoid being painted as a racist – or, in more modern parlance, as a believer in  racialism, which is less odious but just as debilitating to public discourse.  Steele, who himself is African-American, is well-positioned to comment on all this, and probably because of his own racial background (and the resultant need to avoid the tired charge of being a traitor to his own race) is one of the most careful living writers on the subject. 

In other words, his ideas cannot be dismissed.  Give them a read.

On Christmas Eve we share the words from my very favorite Christmas carol,

 What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?

We wish a blessed Christmas to all.

Mike Huckabee, Convicts, and Religion

Anyone not living in a cave for the last 48 hours knows that Maurice Clemmons, the murderer of four police officers in Seattle, was once in state prison in Arkansas – until Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence. Huck has been running away from that decision and attempting to spread the blame to others involved in processing Clemmons through the legal system. It’s been suggested that Huckabee’s faith played a huge role in his clemency decisions as governor. The man himself has not yet addressed that question, probably because he doesn’t want to touch it.

That’s understandable.

Consider: While Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee issued 1,033 pardons, twice as many as the prior three Arkansas governors combined. Just as a point of comparision, Mitt Romney did not issue a single pardon while Governor of Massachusetts. I have a hunch that Huckabee, as a potential 2012 presidential candidate, is now . . . toast.

David Frum Thinks The Whole GOP Religion Situation Is Terrible

At least that’s what he seems to be saying here. Frum, who’s unhappy with religious conservatives generally, sees the Manhattan Declaration’s failure to include Mormons as yet another example of Evangelical bias against that faith. Well, the Declaration was authored not just by Evangelicals but also Catholics and Orthodox Christians, something Frum doesn’t seem to grasp. Also, as I noted here, the Declaration is a doctrinal trinitarian document. Mormons and other heterodox Christian faiths could not have signed it (to say nothing of Orthodox Jews), so the document’s drafters didn’t even invite them to sign. There are political reasons to quibble with the Declaration’s narrowness, but to this Latter-day Saint it doesn’t look like a slap at Romney or Mormonism.

Meanwhile, this writer at the Frum Forum plows ground that have already been plowed ad nauseam. An atheist, he thinks Romney’s religion is fair game:

Devotion to Mormonism, which is completely outside of the American mainstream, requires a certain level of commitment. To what extent will Romney’s faith influence his decision-making? I ask that question of devoted evangelicals and judge them accordingly, and I will do the same of a Mormon. And I am not going to apologize for that.

This is not a stunning insight. In fact, it is a very tired argument, and it always seems to come from the Left.  Move along, folks, nothing here to see . . . . (And thanks to our Article VI reader Mary Lynn, who told us about this piece.)

And Finally: The Romney Religion Question, Studied Once Again

This recently-published study reaches some intuitively unsurprising conclusions:

Our results do, however, indicate that there is something Romney’s supporters can do to assuage concerns about his Mormonism. People who objectively know a lot about Mormons — that is, those who scored 100% on a short quiz on facts about Mormonism — were much less likely to be bothered by the claim that Mormons are not Christians. In contrast, respondents who claimed they knew a lot about Mormons, but who actually did not, were bothered most of all by claims about Mormonism. . . .

In other words, our study suggests that Romney’s supporters would do well to encourage those who are troubled by his faith to become better informed about Mormonism.

Such a discussion would likely help Romney: Information helps and ignorance hurts his chances. More important, it would help broaden religious tolerance in America.

Well, whats not to agree with there?

For example, amid all the discussion about how to reduce our dependency on carbon-based fuels, stories like this one come out and remind me that we really could solve the problem if we made it more of a priority to do so. Consider the story’s lede:

Talk about a Eureka moment. Scientists at Sandia National Labs, seeking a means to create cheap and abundant hydrogen to power a hydrogen economy, realized they could use the same technology to “reverse-combust” CO₂ back into fuel. Researchers still have to improve the efficiency of the system, but they recently demonstrated a working prototype of their “Sunshine to Petrol” machine that converts waste CO₂ to carbon monoxide, and then syngas, consuming nothing but solar energy.

Well, how about that?  Is it really so far-fetched to think that such efforts could produce serious game-changing breakthroughs if we devote enough resources to them?  Considering what we got out of the U.S. Space Program in the 60s and 70s, I don’t think so.

Meanwhile, nations everywhere seem to be recognizing nuclear power’s potential as a safe, clean source of energy.   The Washington Post reports:

Nuclear power — long considered environmentally hazardous — is emerging as perhaps the world’s most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.

Maybe we need to have more faith in our ability to solve the energy problem – whether one considers that problem one of excessive  dependence on unstable or unfriendly suppliers, or excessive emissions from carbon-based fuels.

As a Ute fan of the first order my hopes will be high but I’m trying to stay realistic.  It should be fun to watch anyway.  The game is on CBS College Sports at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time today.  <a href=”http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705344334/Utes-excited-for-dream-game.html”>Here’s a short pregame write-up</a>.